Year of the Demon (34 page)

Glorious Victory was long enough to parry them all. His left hand finally found Glorious Victory’s grip. He turned the blades aside and cut low. Three men fell in a torrent of blood.

Daigoro couldn’t say how he found his way to the heart of the Toyotomi formation. His mind was reeling; he’d never fought like this before. Single combat was nothing at all like a swirling melee. It was as if his mind had no relation to his arms. He cut, blocked, deflected, counterstruck, all on raw instinct. By the time he figured out what was happening, he and Katsushima were standing back to back in the middle of the courtyard, surrounded by Toyotomi samurai.

The enemy formed an impenetrable hedgerow of red armor, gold plating, and shimmering steel. Surrounding them was another circle, this one russet and black and silver: over a hundred samurai adorned with the Okuma bear paw.

Somehow amid the chaos there came a lull, a standoff, and Daigoro found he could hear and see with amazing clarity. Every sword and spearhead shone as distinctly as stars on a moonless night. Katsushima was breathing heavily; his broad shoulders pressed against Daigoro’s back, hot and heaving and stinking the coppery reek of blood. A wry laugh made Katsushima’s body quake. He said, “What did I tell you about patience?”

Daigoro twisted his fists tighter on Glorious Victory’s cloth-bound grip. The circle of enemies drew tighter.

“It’s been an honor,” said Katsushima.

“Likewise,” said Daigoro, suddenly thinking of Akiko and the baby in her belly. Today of all days, it seemed a terrible shame to leave her.

Again the circle tightened. Daigoro readied himself to strike. Then a voice broke the eerie silence, bellowing “
Stand down!
” There came a clicking, clanking commotion through the ranks of samurai, and then the Toyotomi commander muscled his way to the center of the circle.

“Hold,” he yelled, sensing his men’s uneasiness. “Lord Okuma! What is the meaning of this?”

“Your man started it,” Daigoro said. As soon as the words left his mouth they sounded childish. It took him a moment to regain his breath before he could speak again, and only because his words failed him did he notice that he was panting hard enough to make his lungs burn.

“Not your man,” he said finally. “General Shichio’s. He was planted in your ranks. I’m sure of it. Shichio wants a fight with me, whatever the cost.”

“And you certainly obliged him, didn’t you?” said the commander. “You tell me how I’m to leave your head on your shoulders.”

Daigoro tried to slow his breath before he answered. “If I die, you die. And your men too. We outnumber you two to one.”

“We’ve been outnumbered a lot worse than that.”

“You’ve been used, Commander. You were sent here on false pretenses.”

“That’s as may be. Orders are orders.”

“Your orders are no more than a screen of fog. They only cloud what hides behind them, and indeed I believe that to be their purpose. What honor is there in dying on orders like these? Spare your men. Let them die a more glorious death, in a battle worthy of their birthright.”

The commander closed his eyes. He returned his
katana
to his hip, ready to sheathe it—or, if he was a crafty fighter, ready to attack the moment Daigoro let down his guard. His lips moved almost imperceptibly; Daigoro wondered if it might have been a prayer. If so, Glorious Victory’s work was not yet done.

The commander looked at him again, his eyes utterly emotionless. His gaze did not waver; his sword hand did not shake. He had no fear of dying where he stood. “If you grant me leave to go, I can come back in force,” he said. “I can push this whole mountain into the sea.”

“Yes, you can,” said Daigoro. “And I can send riders and ships to the regent, telling him of how your men barged into my home to pick a fight. Do not forget: my family holds a treaty with the regent. When your reinforcements arrive, it might be your head they come for.”

The commander’s right forefinger was tapping his sword’s
tsuba
. It was a tell, a nervous tic, and Daigoro desperately wished he knew what it meant.

“
Bushido
demands forbearance,” he said quickly. “Commander, you must see that by now. It was one of your men who instigated the fight. All I did was finish it. How can you start the fighting anew and still retain your honor?”

The two of them met each other’s gaze. A long, tense, electric silence passed between them. Then the commander sheathed his blade.

Just like that, the danger vanished. The storm cloud hanging over the courtyard dispersed on the wind. Swords went back into scabbards; muscles relaxed; Okumas and Toyotomis found their way into two facing formations of ranks and files, taking care not to bump shoulders with each other as they passed. Daigoro found it surreal. Had Hideyoshi’s commander chosen to strike instead, dozens of these samurai would already be dead.

As it was, Daigoro still thought too many had died needlessly. Making his way back to the veranda, he stepped over four corpses and one bleeding samurai who hadn’t yet succumbed but only had strength enough to blink. Daigoro stopped, took a step back, and looked at the dying man again. His face was a sticky red mask, but nevertheless Daigoro made out his mousy features. This was the lean one with the runner’s body, the one who had started it all. Daigoro resisted the urge to cut his throat and hasten his passing.

He looked up from the instigator only to find Tomo sitting with his back against one of the porch posts. He was staring at his feet, his jaw slack. Then Daigoro saw the little cut just above his collarbone. It was no wider than the tip of his thumb, but it was enough.

Daigoro fell to his knees beside him. Tomo’s palms were red with blood, but otherwise the external bleeding was minimal. By clutching his throat he’d probably been able to keep himself from bleeding to death, Daigoro guessed, but unable to keep the blood from gushing inward. More than likely he’d drowned in his own blood.

It was no way for a fifteen-year-old boy to die. Daigoro wanted to order his men to attack. He wanted to start the slaughter all over again. He wanted to chop and hack and slash until there was nobody left to kill.

Instead he took a silent moment for himself over Tomo’s body, then struggled to his feet. His legs were weak, the right one even weaker than usual. “Commander,” he said sullenly, “I see no need to send word of today’s events to General Toyotomi. The only one who conducted himself dishonorably lies dead. Do you agree?”

The Toyotomi commander looked down at the scrawny, mouse-faced corpse. It did not bleed anymore; it only seeped. “I do,” he said.

Daigoro’s thoughts turned inevitably back to Tomo. It took a while to muster enough energy to speak again. Without looking up at the Toyotomi commander he said, “You may tell your troops to sit if you’d like. I’ll see to it that they have something to eat and drink before you take them on the march again.”

“That would be most gracious of you,” said the commander, and his permanent frown seemed to lessen somewhat. “And lest I forget,” he added, “congratulations on your baby.”

Daigoro’s shoulders sank. He’d forgotten all about that. He’d have to hunt down Akiko and he’d have to do it soon. She had never seen bloodshed in her own home before. She would need consoling—and so do I, he realized. He felt like a dying campfire in the rain, as if what little spirit he had left was soon to sputter out, never to return.

Daigoro looked around for Tomo, who would have understood what provisions he wanted prepared with no more than a nod. Then his conscious mind took the reins from instinct; he remembered, and then his gaze found the body. The cherubic face was bloodless now, the ever-present smile erased.

How had it come to this? He’d done the right thing, hadn’t he? How could it have been wrong to try to save Tomo’s life? And yet more bodies lay in his courtyard than he cared to count. It could have been just two: Tomo and Tomo’s killer. Now he and Hideyoshi had both lost men—good, brave men who’d spent their entire lives in servitude, and who had surrendered their lives without hesitation.

Daigoro had been so sure he’d done the right thing. Glorious Victory Unsought agreed with him; had he been seeking glory, she would have seen to it that he too lay among the dead. But
he
was the one to draw first blood. Not Tomo’s captor; Daigoro himself. He was the one who initiated combat, even if he wasn’t the one who instigated it. And now his friend was dead, and others too.

Why? he wondered. Why is it always so costly for me to do the right thing? And why can
I
not be the one to bear the brunt of it? It should be me sitting there. I should have been the one to drown in my own blood.

It was no way for a fifteen-year-old servant boy to die. It was no better a death for a sixteen-year-old newlywed expecting his first child. Nonetheless, Daigoro wished he’d been the one to fall.

34

M
uch later, when the regent’s company was long gone and the stars had blossomed in their millions, Daigoro led Katsushima down to the hot spring tucked away in a grotto on Okuma lands. There was a little house built around the spring, not for privacy so much as protection from assassins’ arrows. The Okumas had held this land for a long time, including days when Izu was not so stable as it was now.

As Daigoro lowered his aching body into the pool, he looked up at the stout wooden rafters, wondering which of his forefathers had ordered them hewn. Perhaps his ancestor had hewn them himself, back in the days when the Okumas did not have flocks of servants and laborers at their command. Those old beams had weathered so much, and still they showed no signs of weakness.

Daigoro thought about that while he stretched, bending his neck this way and that, rolling his stiff shoulders under the waterline. He wondered how many years he had left in him. At sixteen he already felt like an old man.

“You were clever,” Katsushima said. He’d let his topknot down and his long gray hair hung wet and limp on his shoulders.

“Choosing the hot spring?”

“No. Seeing to it that the Toyotomi commander would not tell Hideyoshi what happened today. That was your goal in promising not to send riders of your own, wasn’t it?”

Daigoro nodded. “I can only hope it works.”

“It should. You’ve got him thinking defensively. It was his man who started the fiasco, after all.”

“We’ll know soon enough,” said Daigoro. He could only imagine how bad Hideyoshi’s reaction might be if word ever reached him that Daigoro drew Toyotomi blood
after
receiving the edict to disarm. The grim-faced commander had threatened to push Soshitake’s twin peaks into the sea, but for an angry Hideyoshi that would be no empty boast. The lord regent was congenial enough in person, but his whims were fickle and his acts of vengeance were well known. Any daimyo could order his generals to commit suicide, but Hideyoshi was known to eliminate even their families. Daigoro thought of Akiko, of how she chose not to join them in the bath lest the water overheat their baby’s little bedroom. As bitter as Tomo’s loss had been, what made his heart race was the thought of how easily Aki might have been slain too.

But what was done was done. Daigoro could not afford to linger on the past. “What now?” he said.

Katsushima shrugged. “Hard to say. Do you think Shichio will move against you again?”

“Yes. He is like Ichiro. He is compelled.”

“I cannot understand him. I don’t wish to cause offense, but he is much too big a fish to be hunting a little minnow like you. If you were down in Kyoto, yes, perhaps you would be of some consequence. Down there the allegiance of every last family has political implications. But as far as Kyoto politics are concerned, House Okuma might as well be on the moon. Why does he even care that you exist?”

Daigoro winced as he rolled his neck. “My father. Shichio has a grudge against him. On top of that, he fancies Glorious Victory.”

“So give it to him.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not? It’s too big for you anyway.”

Daigoro shook his head. “It may not be in the nature of a
ronin
to understand. My father wrote his will on his deathbed with a musket ball in his spine. In it he made it clear that I was to have his sword. Not his eldest son. Me. I cannot disregard his final wish.”

“If you say so,” said Katsushima, but Daigoro could tell by his flippant tone that he didn’t fully grasp what was at stake. That was the difference, Daigoro supposed—the difference between a samurai with a name to uphold and a
ronin
who had forsaken all other relationships when he wedded himself to his sword.

“We can be thankful for small mercies, at least,” said Katsushima, who submerged himself until the waterline was just at his lower lip. The very picture of contentment, he said, “At least your mother chose not to fly from her birdcage today.”

“Damn you,” Daigoro said, his anger suddenly spiking. He pounded the rim of the bath with his palm. “Must you speak that way?”

His fatigue was to blame. The entire day had taxed him emotionally, and now his temper was like a willful horse, stronger than him and too hard to control. But like it or not, there he was in the saddle. He did his best to rein his feelings in. “I beg your pardon, Goemon. That was unkind. But it is unseemly to speak of her that way. She is no house pet. She’s my mother.”

Katsushima closed his eyes. “That she is.”

“Is it not bad enough that I have to sedate her day and night? Is it not bad enough that I’m likely to empty the last of my coffers buying all those poppies for Yagyu to milk? You are the only friend I have left. I will not have you berating my own mother. I cannot bear it.”

“How did I berate her? I said she had a good day. She didn’t run off foaming at the mouth.”

Again Daigoro felt that spike of anger. It hit him like a physical thing, stabbing through his veins. He was not certain that the volcano heated the water; his own rage was more than hot enough to make it steam. “First she’s a bird in a cage, and now she’s a rabid animal. What would you have me do, Katsushima? Cull her to spare the rest of the herd?”